Goodbye *sniffle*

Today, I’ve decided to talk to you about The Brunching Shuttlecocks , blogs, and my trip to Italy. Sadly, there will be nothing funny in here written by me, although you will be linked to quite a few things, so I hope you enjoy it. This is my final feature before I hop on a plane, after all.

Some of you no doubt remember my news post from a few months ago when I lamented that Brunching had ceased to be. Almost all of you know that Brunching inspired the direction that Jux eventually took, albeit with plenty of twists of our own. Hell, we’ve even ripped them off a few times. And I’m proud to admit that. I still miss Brunching, a lot.

What I forgot to mention in that news post is that Brunching, in some ways, lives on. Last night I ventured back to The Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie for the first time in awhile. I read it every few months…I like to let enough build up over time. Anyway, it’s a weblog run by none other than Lore, the genius behind The Brunching Shuttlecocks. And he’s still funny. Why I haven’t linked to that before, I don’t know, but there it is now.

Some of you know that I tend to, well, hate blogs. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. They bore me. Travis links me random blogs all the time, and I hardly ever bother to read them. But, I do read Lore’s journal, and I read Zach Stroum’s , and a few other people’s. Hell, many of you are bitching by this point that Jux’s main page might as well be a blog, sometimes. So what makes these different from the blogs I don’t bother to read? To put it simply…nothing at all.

The blog phenomenon is basically, from my point of view anyway, people talking about things that strike them as funny, offend them, or are otherwise important to them. The reason I don’t read many is that I honestly don’t care what other people think about most issues today. That’s not as bad as it sounds. When you think about it, do you really expect me to care what some random girl in Jersey thinks about Microsoft’s latest anti-piracy initiative? No? Granted, sometimes you get new points of view, but for the most part I end up just getting irritated by listening to someone complain for a few pages. I’m interesting in the blogs of the people above because I either know them, or are infatuated with their work. Which brings me to the other main problem with blogs: lack of writing ability. Zach can write, Lore can write. I’ll even venture to say of my ramblings on the main page of Jux that, occasionally, I can write. The majority of people writing blogs don’t sound much, if any, better than the emo kids who fill LiveJournals with pages of “My ‘rents r so stupd sumtimes i hte them.”

Okay, maybe they’re a bit better than that. The point is I have nothing against blogs, just don’t expect me to read them. Moving back to Brunching, there are a few other relics, which you’ve no doubt found out about if you followed the link to Brunching’s corpse above. The best of these is The Book of Ratings , written by Lore, which continues perhaps the best loved of the Brunching segments. It’s also the one we’ve ripped off. Coincidence? No.

The only reason those pages haven’t been added to the Link Farm yet is because I’m lazy. They probably won’t be added until I’m back from Italy, because I have no time.

As for my trip to Italy, the news post on the main page has told you that I’m going to try to post some journal features, and at the very least you can expect some news posts from me. Hopefully I won’t let you people down. Hopefully, all of you, and more, will be here when I return in mid-August. I can’t really ask much more, can I?